The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

How Do You Handle a Problem Like Rodrigo Duterte?

Awkwardly, apparently.

Awkward facts surrounding Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's awkward estrangement from the United States seem to produce some awkward reporting.

I have a piece up at Asia Times about “Sonofawhore-gate”
i.e. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s alleged insult delivered to President Obama that got the Duterte-Obama
confab in Laos canceled, and was breathlessly reported in much of the Western press to the exclusion of the issues Duterte was raising: Truth
and Duterte in Media Crosshairs.

As a langniappe, it provides a deep dive into what was
apparently the most important issue in US-China relations, “Stairgate”, the
cock-up with the delivery of the motorized stairs needed for President Obama to
deplane from Air Force One at the G20 meeting in Hangzhou in the proper
presidential fashion.

Probably unfairly—I don’t read all the coverage—but I feel
reporting on Duterte has been pretty shallow in terms of explaining his
attitude toward the US presence in the Philippines.Seems I’ve pretty much held that corner alone. [Update: Reader GW pointed me to a fine piece by Adele Webb of the University of Sydney on the same theme. So I do not have this corner all to myself.]

Long story short, the American presence in Duterte’s home
ground of Mindanao has been a 115 year horror show that Duterte is trying to
end.The most recent iteration is
Duterte’s declaration that he wants all U.S. Special Forces removed from
Mindanao.

Duterte has appalled the United States not only by
criticizing the US presence, but by engaging bilaterally with China on the issues
brought to a head by the UNCLOS arbitral award instead of doing that
shoulder-to-shoulder Pivot Thunder! thing to confront the PRC as part of a
US-orchestrated united front.

I’ve written some pretty nifty pieces on the issues
surrounding Duterte and the US:

Here’s another one! focusing on the under-reported
consequences of Duterte’s drug war.

Duterte’s first priority is the drug war which is reported
in the Western press primarily through the lens of the vigilante killings.

To keep the frame on Duterte’s excesses in a way that makes
it easier for Human Rights Watch to flay his policies as “death squads run amok
for no justifiable reason”, there have been interesting attempts to dismiss
the Philippine drug problem as no big deal.

But apparently it really is a big
deal in terms of its social costs (the Philippines has the highest rate of
meth use in East Asia), multinational implications (Philippine mules are
getting executed in China and in Indonesia, the Sinaloa cartel has even started
exploring the Philippine as a market and source of material), and as a driver for corruption
of Philippine government and security forces that reaches up to the highest level.

The actual story is that Duterte is not only using the
threat of summary executions to round up addicts and pushers; he’s naming
names, both of cartel leaders and the national and local politicians and
officers who shelter them.It’s a rather
thrilling high stakes game—allegations emerged this week that the bombing in
Davao that killed 14 people and was apparently an assassination attempt on
Duterte was actually conducted by threatened narcopoliticians, not the Abu
Sayyaf Islamist banditti—but the US press has apparently shown little interest
in covering these ramifications.

Also I haven’t seen a lot of reporting on the fact that
Duterte’s drug war necessitates deeper PRC-Philippine engagement in several
important aspects.

First of all, the Philippine drug trade—primarily meth,
locally known as shabu—is dominated
by Chinese Triads by virtue of the fact that the large and poorly regulated PRC
drug industry is a ready source of the intermediates needed to make the drug and
also by the fact that Triads are deeply embedded in the major Chinese-diaspora
presence in Filipino society.The PRC
has a lot to offer in terms of tighter enforcement on the mainland and perhaps
in using its good offices to encourage crackdowns in a key Triad operational base,
Hong Kong.

On the other hand, the PRC can make life difficult for
Duterte if it wants to, by turning a blind eye to the export-oriented meth
trade.So there you have it.

Duterte made his expectations concerning PRC assistance
quite clear by summoning
the PRC ambassador back in August:

The Philippines government said on Wednesday it had summoned
the Chinese ambassador earlier this week to explain reports that traffickers
were bringing in narcotics from China, opening a new front in President Rodrigo
Duterte’s controversial war on drugs.

On Tuesday, the country’s police chief told a Senate hearing
that China, Taiwan and Hong Kong were major sources of illegal drugs, and
Chinese triads were involved in trafficking.

Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay told a Senate
hearing on Wednesday that the Chinese ambassador had been summoned for an
explanation, and the government would also send a diplomatic communication to
Beijing to “pursue this in a more aggressive note.”

Another area of potential Philippine-PRC cooperation is PRC
assistance in a crash program to rehabilitate the Philippine drug users who have
turned themselves in to the police to avoid getting targeted by the death
squads.

Though virtually unreported in the Western media, over 700,000
users have turned themselves in.

Let me repeat that.700,000
drug users have turned themselves in.

And they presumably need to get a clean "rehab" chit to live safely in their communities, presenting a major challenge for the Philippines drug rehabilitation infrastructure.Duterte has called on the Philippine military to make base acreage
available for additional rehab camps and the first one will apparently be at Camp Ramon
Magsaysay.

Magsaysay is the largest military reservation in the
Philippines.It is also the jewel in the
diadem, I might say, of the five Philippine bases envisioned for US use under
EDCA, the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement that officially returned US
troops to Philippine bases.It looks
like the US military might be sharing Magsaysay with thousands of drug users…and
PRC construction workers.

I expect the Pentagon is quietly fuming at Duterte’s
presumption.

Duterte is understandably leaning on China to assist him
with his drug war.The Philippine
establishment may or may not be thoroughly corrupted by drug money, but it’s
probably happy to restrain him by slowwalking legislation related to the
war.

And although the United States quickly “committed” $32
million for “law enforcement and training”, who knows when and if it’ll show up
and where it will end up. I also get a
feeling the US wouldn’t mind seeing Duterte and his drug war fall on their
*sses, so the civilian and military Philippine establishment could get back to
its main mission of pleasing the United States and returning to a pivot-centric
foreign policy.

So Duterte is going executive decree, and twisting China’s
arm to get quick, effective “facts on the ground” i.e. rehab camps. I suspect the camps are absolutely essential
to Duterte’s plan; if he can’t process the users, he’ll have to leave them in
their communities and the drug war will be revealed as a damp squib and a farce—unless
the death squads are up to massacring another 700,000 people, which I think is
beyond even their murderous capabilities.

It looks like Duterte thinks that the UNCLOS ruling could be put
to better use extorting Chinese cooperation to house an army of drug addicts, instead
of gratifying the United States by a futile attempt to evict the PRC from
Scarborough Shoal (the PRC, by the way, appears to be allowing Filipino fishing
boats to work the shoal, at least for now).

Interesting, no?

But an immense social and political upheaval concerning
drugs and highlighting the interdependency of China and the Philippines is
apparently not really worth reporting, since the designated US theme is that
the existential issue for Asia is meeting the military
threat of rising China by a big reboot of the US presence in the
Philippines.

The US government and US-friendly Western press may be
unhappy with Duterte and his tilt away from the US, but finding a news hook to
demonize him is a little difficult.

For one thing, the way the US and Aquino administration
structured EDCA oh-so-cleverly to avoid legislative review apparently put control of
implementation completely in the hands of the President of the Philippines--who
turned out not to be a pliable member of the Manila set but Rodrigo Duterte.If the US gets too pointed in its criticism,
US access to bases in the Philippines, a cherished US objective since the
eviction of US forces in 1993 and an important chess piece in the South China
Sea, might get restricted.

Third, Duterte is popular thanks to his whole-hearted prosecution
of the drug war.His approvals are up in
the 80s I believe.

Fourth, the US record in the Philippines is genuinely
god-awful.The mission that the United
States wants to focus on—what I call the sailor suit/battleship/yo ho ho
democracy and freedom confronting China in the SCS—is a small fraction of the
reality of the US presence in the Philippines and its corrupting penetration of
the Philippines’ military and security forces and the Manila elite.Doing a deep dive into America’s Duterte
problem means acknowledging that the US presence in the Philippines
recapitulates the Indian Wars, Vietnam, and Iraq: a gigantic and bloody
imperial botch.

No need, I think, to trouble the beautiful minds of American
readers with the realization that Duterte’s tilt away from the US is completely
understandable and probably justified.

So I expect the roots of Duterte’s problems with the United
States will not get a particularly extensive and honest airing in the Western
press.

However, I expect alternative reporting frames have to be
developed to guide a bewildered readership if Duterte persists in twisting
America’s bayag.

There has been some road-testing of “Duterte is a paid-for Chinese
stooge” to explain his otherwise inexplicable lack of America love and
willingness to go bilateral engagement with the PRC, but that doesn’t seem to
have acquired sufficient legs.

The US government and press seems to be settling into the “Philippines’
Donald Trump” mode i.e. Duterte is an unstable reactionary goon unfit for the
high mission of sustaining the rules-based international order that’s all the
vogue these days, and blind to the fact that in the age of rising China the
Philippines has no space to run a non-aligned foreign policy.

The best way to understand Duterte is to listen to him in
his own words sans filter.

Here’s the video of his infamous press conference before he
embarked to Laos (in my AT article I incorrectly placed the presser at Manila;
he was actually leaving from Davao International Airport; sorry!).

Only 19 minutes and well worth your time.At the end, you’ll understand Duterte and his
priorities pretty well.

And at the end, you also get a harbinger of things to come—Duterte’s
impending clash with the Manila elites who he believes are being egged on by
Washington to impede his policies. In his final words, Duterte provided this characterization of the local critics who felt it was more important for Duterte to respond
to questions from Obama concerning human rights abuses in the drug war than to assert
Filipino sovereignty and dignity:

There are others with mental
capacity of dogs who lap at the ass of the Americans.

As it transpired, Duterte discarded his prepared remarks in
Vientiane to deliver a denunciation of US historical crimes in Mindanao,
complete with atrocity photos.

Duterte says a lot of interesting and important things.But I doubt you’ll read a lot about them in
the Western papers.